Committee Recommends 'Streamlined' Budget Process

Members of a newly formed financial advisory committee presented the Ridgewood Council Wednesday night with recommendations they said will streamline the municipal budget process.

The preliminary recommendations from the committee, in its first presentation to the council, focused on supplying village department heads and the governing body with more detailed information on the costs and revenues of different village services.

A main short-term priority for better assessing costs within the budget, they said, was that the day-to-day operating budget be more linked with the capital budget, the requests made by departments for larger investments on items like equipment and facility improvements.

Currently, the capital budget is a separate process that follows adoption of the operating budget.

“As private sector kind of people, those things are done in tandem,” said Roberta Sonenfeld, the vice chairperson of the committee.

Deputy Mayor Albert Pucciarelli, the liaison to the committee, endorsed that recommendation before approval last month of the 2013 capital budget, noting that keeping capital and operating costs separate hampered officials in clearly keeping track of the cost of depreciation.

Another short-term recommendation of the committee was to compile summaries of costs and revenues for each department to make the nearly yearlong budget process more focused on the areas where the governing body can make an impact.

For example, the costs of the village's gasoline are in the budget – but there is currently no way to easily determine how much of that cost comes from running police, fire or public works vehicles, according to members of the committee.

“It was hard once we got into detailed budgets to see what the actual costs of each department were,” said Mac Highet, a member of the committee.

Their proposal was to incorporate a new template displaying departmental summaries, to provide officials during the process with the information on where the true costs of operating the village lay..

“If we know where we have levers to pull, we know where to focus our attention,” Pucciarelli said in agreement.

Councilwoman Bernadette Walsh, while expressing support for the committee's recommendations, raised concern that changing the process could place additional burdens on village staff. Sonenfeld, however, said that through its recommendations the committee hoped to cut the budget cycle in half, allowing for a more efficient use of time.

And Pucciarelli reassured that the process would not be a “witch hunt” for employees operating inefficiencies.

“There’s nothing threatening about this,” he said.

The long-term goals outlined by the committee included establishing long-range plans ahead of the budget process, to anticipate coming expenses, and “coordination of municipal and education budgeting processes to insure better and more transparent reporting of total budget impact to village residents.”

The committee also proposed that the village adopt measurements of the success of the municipality beyond the numbers, like employee and resident satisfaction with services, as well as the development of a financial performance report for the public.

“What we’re trying to do is present a more holistic view of costs,” Sonenfeld said.

The council is expected to take up the short-term recommendations at a meeting next month, in preparation for the 2014 budget process.